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Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Reducing the Democratic Deficit and Increasing Participation

The following is an article from The Montreal Gazette about proportional representation, which I believe would go a long way toward improving politics and citizen participation in Canada. Although not perfect, it takes account of every vote with none being wasted and every collective viewpoint getting its share of representation. No need for strategic voting. You can actually vote your conscience and have it mean something. It's far more democratic, resulting in a government that better reflects the populace. When done right.

Proportional representation revisited

By Linda Gyulai, Gazette civic affairs reporterJuly 23, 2013

MONTREAL
— It was nearly a century ago that Montrealers voted in a referendum to
create the city executive committee and set up the system of electing a
mayor citywide and dozens of councillors by district that exists to
this day.

The losing option on the May 1921 referendum ballot was
having a smaller council elected by proportional representation, with
the mayor chosen by councillors.

It was the last time Montrealers
were given a say on the kind of system that should be used to elect
representatives to city hall.

Now, with the Charbonneau Commission
and the province’s anti-corruption squad revealing graft and other
corruption on a scale not seen in city politics since scandals a century
ago led to a provincial trusteeship and in turn to the 1921 referendum,
it’s appropriate to re-examine the fateful plebiscite and consider
holding another, activist and author Paul Cliche says.

Maybe this time Montrealers would get it right, he adds.

“You
can’t take the electoral system and say it will fix everything,” said
Cliche, a long-standing advocate for proportional representation, or PR,
for the provincial and municipal levels. The Québec solidaire activist
and onetime Montreal city councillor wrote a book on PR.

“But it can help. It would improve on the democratic deficit and the public would be better represented.”
Local
proponents of PR — which exists in some form in most countries except
Canada — have long argued that it’s a more equitable system to translate
voter intention into distribution of seats than the traditional
first-past-the-post system that Canada borrowed from Britain.

But
these days, PR’s defenders can tout its other argued advantages —
increased public interest and higher voter turnout, a proliferation of
smaller parties and increased chances for coalition governments — as
arguments in favour of electoral reform, as a string of elected
officials and civil servants in several Quebec municipalities face
corruption charges.

Under the first-past-the-post voting system,
one representative is elected by district or constituency and need only
get more votes than her or his rivals to win that seat. So a candidate
can win a seat with only 20 or 30 per cent voter support in the
district, and all ballots cast in favour of second- and third-place
finishers are essentially wasted.

The result is a distortion of
voter intention because the system tends to award disproportionately
more seats to the first-place finisher than its share of the popular
vote, and disproportionately fewer seats to the second-place finisher.

For
example, 40.2 per cent of all votes cast in the 1998 Montreal municipal
election were for incumbent mayor Pierre Bourque’s Vision Montreal
party while 26.4 per cent were for Jacques Duchesneau’s New Montreal,
which finished second. But Vision Montreal nabbed 76.5 per cent of the
council seats — 39 out of 51 — and New Montreal got just 3.9 per cent,
or two seats. New Montreal scored second-place finishes in 34 of the
districts.

Montreal’s elections office hasn’t made public the
total number of votes tallied for each party in the 2001, 2005 and 2009
municipal votes, making it difficult to calculate the distortion.

Under
full or partial PR, the number of seats won by a party or group of
candidates is proportionate or roughly proportionate to the number of
votes received. There is no single-member district. Instead, PR can take
the form of lists of multiple representatives elected in a large
district.

PR tends to encourage higher voter turnout because every
vote counts in determining who wins a seat and minority parties
suddenly have a shot at winning seats, veteran Montreal municipal
activist Andrea Levy said.
“One of the greatest advantages of PR
is to increase interest and participation because it opens up the
possibilities for smaller parties and minorities,” she said.

“So
from the vantage point of diversity, from the vantage point of
democracy, from the vantage point of participation, proportional
representation is one of the fundamental reforms.”

The possibility of electing smaller parties and independent candidates would mean more watchdogs on council, she noted.

Turnout
in Montreal elections has varied between 30 and 50 per cent over the
last 20 years. Public apathy allows corruption to flourish, Levy added.

In
the 1990s, while member of a small reform party called Ecology
Montreal, Levy co-wrote a proposal to introduce PR into Montreal’s
electoral system.

The proposal seemed to die with the party, until
Projet Montréal adopted it in its inaugural program in 2005. However,
the party dropped PR from the program before the 2009 municipal
election, leaving Cliche, Levy and other reformers frustrated.

Similarly, the now-defunct Montreal Citizens’ Movement dropped PR from its program when it was elected to city hall in 1986.

There
are different forms of PR, and the easiest one to introduce in Montreal
without an overhaul of the system would be mixed-member proportional,
which exists in local elections in London, England, Levy said.
Under
that system, Levy proposes 40 city councillors would be elected by
district under the traditional first-past-the-post system. Meanwhile,
another 20 would be elected citywide using PR.

“That’s a fairly
simple system and easy enough to explain,” Levy said. The advantage is
the 20 PR seats would compensate for the distortions of the
first-past-the-post system, she said.

A more complicated system,
but one that Cliche and Levy said they favour, is the
single-transferable vote system. The system is less common, used in
Ireland and Scotland, and for city and school board elections in
Cambridge, Mass.

Under that system, each voter elects multiple
candidates and ranks their order of preference on the ballot, placing a
“1” by their first choice, “2” by their second choice and so on.

A
winning threshold — the minimum number of votes needed to win a seat —
is calculated based on the number of valid ballots cast and the number
of seats to be filled. Any candidate on the list who exceeds the minimum
gets elected. If a candidate gets more votes than the minimum, the
surplus votes are transferred to voters’ next preference. If no
candidate gets the minimum number of votes, the candidate with the
fewest votes is eliminated from the list and their votes are transferred
to the next preference of the electors who voted for the eliminated
candidate.

No ballots are wasted because votes
cast for a losing candidate as well as excess votes for a winning
candidate are transferred to electors’ next-choice candidates.

Electoral
reform is also a theme in Toronto, where city council made a
groundbreaking decision in June to adopt a ranked ballot system that
would see voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than
marking off their top choice on the ballot.

But while the Toronto
proposal, which has yet to be accepted by the Ontario legislature, may
sound like the single-transferable vote, it’s still a winner-take-all
system electing a single member per district.
Under Toronto’s
proposal, which is also known as instant run-off, a candidate would have
to garner a majority of votes and not just more votes than the
second-place finisher to win a seat. If no candidate earns more than 50
per cent of the vote when all the first-place finishes are counted, the
last-place candidate would be eliminated and the second choices of the
voters who cast ballots in favour of that candidate would be allocated
to the remaining candidates. The process of eliminating last-place
finishers would continue until a candidate surpasses 50 per cent of the
vote.

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About Me

The Pündi are a race from my fantasy novels, the Continuum Chronicles, an exploration of spiritual evolution theory. Appearing like us, they are really child-sized aliens cursed by their own intelligence, trapped as observers unable to share their knowledge. They often develop an individual obsessive interest.

I write and publish, not selling anything, just trying to share ideas that might profit everyone. I aim not for originality but creativity, organizing what exists to generate new associations. I'm a writer with thick glasses and autism, familiar with the struggle for clarity. Novelist, researcher, internet activist, spiritual evolutionist, and process philosopher, I believe in democratic social capitalism with a well-regulated engine of sustainable markets. As a writer, I find that most blockages tend to be improvements trying to occur to me.